Apple MacBook Air (M1, 2020)
Apple announced the new MacBook Air (M1, 2020) at its November 10 One More Thing event, and we’ve been spending some quality time with it to find out just how much of an overhaul this new MacBook is.
While our full review will appear later this week, based on further in-depth testing, this hands-on review includes our initial findings and early thoughts about the MacBook Air (M1, 2020).
Apple is billing the MacBook Air (M1, 2020) as a radical reinvention of its thin and light laptop. This is because, unlike earlier models, the new MacBook Air ditches the Intel processor for Apple's own ARM-based chip, the new Apple M1. It also comes with macOS 11 Big Sur preinstalled.
According to Apple, this custom chip will allow the new MacBook Air to perform better and run longer while on battery, while bringing other big performance benefits too. Now that we've had the MacBook Air (M1, 2020) in our hands, we've been able to put those claims to the test.
- Also check out our hands-on MacBook Pro 13-inch (M1, 2020)
- And here's our hands-on Mac mini (M1, 2020) review
Price and availability
Apple made preorders for the MacBook Air (M1, 2020) available as soon as it was announced, with units shipping from November 17 worldwide. Many Apple Stores are closed due to the global pandemic, so your best option for getting one right now is by ordering online.
Prices for the new MacBook Air (2020) start at $999 / £999 / AU$1,599. As usual, there are a number of specifications available at launch, and you can further customize these to get the MacBook Air (2020) that best suits your needs and budget.
The base model features an M1 chip with an 8-core CPU and 7-core GPU, 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD.
There's also a higher-specced model, priced at $1,249 / £1,249 / AU$1,949, which has an M1 chip with an 8-core CPU and 8-core GPU, 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. So, for that extra money you're getting an additional core in the GPU, and double the storage.
You can also configure these models to have 16GB of RAM (for $200 / £200 / AU$300 extra), and up to 2TB of SSD storage (for $800 / £800 / AU$1,200).
For comparison, the MacBook Air (2020) launched earlier this year for $999 / £999 / AU$1,599, which was actually cheaper than the launch price of the MacBook Air (2019).
So you're getting the new MacBook Air (M1, 2020) for the same price as the earlier model, which we commend Apple for. If you bought a MacBook Air a few months ago, however, you may feel a little annoyed that it’s already outdated.
That $999 / £999 / AU$1,599 entry point isn’t just the cheapest way of getting a new Apple laptop; it’s an incredibly competitive price point that undercuts many of the best 13-inch laptops running Windows 10, such as the Dell XPS 13. If you thought Apple’s laptops were overpriced compared to the competition, think again.
Design
We've mentioned how, thanks to its competitive price, the MacBook Air (M1, 2020) is helping challenge people’s preconceptions about MacBooks – but the new MacBook Air, along with the MacBook Pro 13-inch (M1, 2020) and Mac mini (M1, 2020), also offer strong rebuttals to the criticism, often leveled at the Apple, that its products are more style than substance.
People often dismiss Apple as making products that look good, but that don’t do anything particularly revolutionary when it comes to the actual hardware. With the MacBook Air (M1, 2020), however, it's the complete opposite.
With this laptop, Apple has actually done some really exciting things on the inside – switching to its own M1 chip, and building macOS Big Sur from the ground up to take advantage of it – while leaving the actual design of the device completely unchanged. This is both good news and bad news.
First, the good news. For many people, the iconic design of the MacBook Air is pretty much perfect, so they don't see the need for any radical change. At the same time, by simply offering minor spec bumps every year, the MacBook Air was in danger of being outclassed by more ambitious rivals. So, by concentrating on revolutionizing the hardware of the MacBook Air, and not tinkering with the design, Apple is doing something many of its critics have argued it should do: focus on the unglamorous, yet essential, stuff.
We’ll look about how successful this move is in more detail in our full review. But what about the bad news? Well, because the MacBook Air (M1, 2020), along with macOS Big Sur, promises to be such a big revolution, the fact that it looks – and feels – exactly the same as previous MacBook Airs is a little disappointing, to put it mildly.
The MacBook Air (M1, 2020)’s dimensions of 0.16–0.63 x 11.97 x 8.36 inches (0.41–1.61 x 30.41 x 21.24cm) and weight of 2.8 pounds (1.29kg) are exactly the same as those of both the MacBook Air (2020) and the 2019 model, and virtually the same as those of the 2018 Air, which is a bit lighter.
On the outside, then, this new MacBook Air looks identical to the three previous models – and it means that the excitement that comes with pulling the new MacBook Air from its packaging is somewhat dulled, particular if you've owned one of those earlier machines.
There had been rumors that the move to Apple’s own silicon would result in lighter devices, but this isn't the case. One big design change that has been enabled by the M1 chip, though, is that the MacBook Air (M1, 2020) is now fanless. This means the internals keep cool enough under workloads without the need for fans to kick in and cool them down. There’s a catch to this (which we’ll get to in a bit), but it means the MacBook Air (M1, 2020) runs virtually silently, and it’s very impressive.
The lack of fans could have allowed Apple to make the new MacBook Air thinner and lighter, so it’s interesting that it remains the same size and weight as its predecessors.
On opening up the MacBook Air (M1, 2020) you’re again presented with a sight that's familiar, and in a good way. The best addition to the previous MacBook Air’s design, the new Magic Keyboard, is again included here. It really is a lovely keyboard to work on, feeling tactile and responsive despite how flat the keys are.
A Touch ID button is again situated above the keyboard, and it remains the best fingerprint scanner we’ve used on a laptop. Too many of the fingerprint scanners on Windows laptops struggle to log us in reliably, but the Touch ID button here logged us in successfully pretty much every time, even when we’d not completely covered the scanner with a finger.
The screen is also virtually the same as the one on the MacBook Air (2020), except for one big difference. So, it’s still 13.3 inches with a 400-nit LED backlit display, and a Retina display of 2560 x 1600 resolution, and comes with Apple's True Tone technology, which automatically adjusts the color temperature on the screen based on the ambient light.
What’s new here is that the MacBook Air (M1, 2020)’s screen now supports the P3 wide color gamut, which results in more accurate, true-to-life images. P3 support used to be only found in the more expensive MacBook Pros, so it’s great to see Apple bring this feature to its more affordable MacBook Air lineup. If you’re a photographer or video editor who requires accurate colors, you no longer have to automatically go for a MacBook Pro.
The screen is also surrounded by those big thick bezels that have been a staple of the MacBook Air’s design for ages now, and which leave this laptop feeling a little dated. Devices such as the Dell XPS 13 and the Huawei MateBook X (2020) offer incredibly thin bezels around the display, and not only does it make these devices look more modern, it means the makers can actually reduce the overall size of the laptop further while offering the same-size screen.
Yep, you read that right: we think Huawei has the edge over to Apple when it comes to thin and light laptop design. Strange times indeed.
The webcam above the screen is also unchanged from last time, with the same 720p FaceTime webcam. The 720p resolution feels distinctly outdated when most competitors offer 1080p, and with more people spending more time working from home these days, we’d have liked Apple to have given the webcam a boost.
However, the company claims that thanks to the M1 chip, the image signal processor has been overhauled, giving the webcam supposedly better noise reduction and dynamic range, along with auto white balance. We’ve only used the webcam for a limited time so far, and it seemed fine, if not mind-blowing – we’ll test it out more for our full review.
Port-wise you get the same two Thunderbolt 3 ports and an audio jack as on recent MacBook Airs. The Thunderbolt 3 ports support charging, and can be used to power external monitors, and transfer data up to 40Gb/s. We’re glad to see that Apple’s move to its own M1 chip, rather than Intel, hasn't meant the loss of the Thunderbolt ports (Thunderbolt is an interface developed by Intel).
Performance
We’ll go into the performance of the MacBook Air (M1, 2020) in more detail in our full review, but we're already impressed. It boots up quickly (an additional benefit of the M1 chip), Big Sur feels fast and responsive, and the new look for the operating system really impresses. The interface has a more modern look, with bright, vibrant colors that really show off the MacBook Air's screen. It's also less cluttered, so you're not overwhelmed by icons and options, while the Control Center has been redesigned based on the version in iOS. It looks neater, and it's easier to use.
All applications that you usually run in macOS on Intel-based MacBooks will work fine with the new MacBook Air (M1, 2020), thanks to some software wizardry using Apple's Rosetta tool, which allows apps to run on the new architecture.
We tried a mix of both new apps built for the M1 chip, as well as legacy apps built for Intel Macs, and running via Rosetta, and there was no noticeable difference in terms of performance. The fact that you can seamlessly run older apps on the new MacBook Air really is commendable – the M1 chip is based on ARM architecture, and one of the biggest drawbacks of Windows 10 on devices running on ARM-based chips is that you're limited to running only ARM-compatible apps from the Windows Store. There's a rather sparse selection of these, and this severely limits the usability of these devices. Microsoft needs to come up with its own Rosetta, pronto.
Not only can you run pretty much any existing Mac app on the MacBook Air (M1, 2020), but thanks to the M1 chip using similar architecture to iPhones, you can now run any iOS app or game as well. This brings a huge amount of new tools to the MacBook, and is genuinely exciting. iOS apps and games are more feature-rich and graphically impressive than ever before, and having access to these could be a game-changer. We played a few iOS games, and they ran perfectly on the MacBook Air – suddenly, the MacBook has become a decent gaming machine.
Apple claims the new MacBook Air is three times faster than other laptops in its class, and faster than 98% of PC laptops sold in the past year. It also says the neural engine is nine times faster than the one in the previous MacBook Air, and its SSD is up to twice as fast thanks to the M1 and the latest flash technology – we’ll put all of these claims to the test in our full review.
One thing to note is that the fanless design of the MacBook Air (M1, 2020) could mean that performance is throttled when it's performing demanding tasks over long periods of time. Because there are no fans to stop it overheating, the only thing it can do is reduce the performance of the components – known as throttling – to control temperatures.
In fact, that’s why pros may want to go for the new MacBook Pro 13-inch. It has the same M1 chip as the MacBook Air, but it has fans, which means it can be used for intensive tasks over longer periods of time, without, Apple claims, throttling.
As for battery life, we knew that the new 'Apple silicon' would be more power-efficient, so it's no surprise to find that the new MacBook Air has the longest battery life of any MacBook Air yet – up to 15 hours of wireless web browsing, or up to 18 hours of video, according to Apple.
In our early tests we’ve been very impressed with the MacBook Air’s battery life – even after a few hours of work (and web browsing), the battery only dropped a few percentage points, and even if you leave it on standby for a day and come back to it, the battery level remains high. We can’t imagine anyone having any complaints with the MacBook Air (M1, 2020)’s battery life.
Early verdict
So far, we've enjoyed using the Apple MacBook Air (M1, 2020) a lot. Big Sur runs well, and the visual overhaul of the operating system offers a nice change, while still feeling familiar. The fact that both new and legacy apps run well on the M1 chip is very commendable, and so far there don't seem to be any issues with running apps built for Intel Macs using Rosetta – the fact that you can now run thousands of iOS apps and games pretty much flawlessly is a huge win as well.
Battery life also seems to be fantastic, and the fanless design is nice, as it means the laptop runs silently; we do have our concerns about how it manages heat, however.
Also, we'd have liked Apple to have been a bit more ambitious with the design of the MacBook Air (M1, 2020) – a bold reinvention of the laptop to match the internal hardware and software overhauls would have made this an even more exciting device.
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